West Bank attack may boost Netanyahu's election chances

On election day in March 2015, facing what looked like a likely defeat, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu posted a video to Facebook.

"The right-wing government is in danger," he warned.

"Arab voters are moving in droves to the polling stations."

His message was crude, and he was later forced to apologise for it. But it had the intended effect - his supporters turned out, and a race that the polls suggested was close turned into a comfortable win for him.

It's now about three days until Israelis go to the polls in the first election since the Hamas attacks on 7 October - and Mr Netanyahu has not needed a video.

Events in the Occupied West Bank may have handed him something far more powerful.

This morning’s shooting at a checkpoint outside the city of Hebron, which killed two Israeli soldiers, has shifted the conversation ahead of the election in a matter of hours.

And, for a prime minister who has spent years casting himself as Israel’s protector, it is a conversation he is a lot more comfortable with.

Today, he moved quickly. He cancelled his campaign events and travelled to Hebron.

He ordered the city sealed off, and told the army to prepare a lockdown of the entire West Bank.

By this evening, he was promising "a very broad IDF operation in Judea and Samaria", the biblical names many Israelis use for the West Bank, "unlike any seen since the Six-Day War" in 1967.

The timing, he noted, would be decided later. But it was "on the way".

His goal was to seem less like an election candidate flagging in the polls and more a commander-in-chief in charge.

And he has good reason. For weeks, the campaign has been dominated by awkward questions: whether he was personally warned by the ruler of the UAE before 7 October (which his office denies), and why he has resisted the kind of state inquiry that one would expect following such a national catastrophe.

There is a second calculation, too. To his right, his own coalition partners - from the ultra-nationalist Religious Zionism and Jewish Power parties - are competing for the same voters in Tuesday’s election.

Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich has called for a military campaign in the West Bank "exactly like in Gaza and Lebanon".

National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, who has been rising in the polls, wants the Palestinian Authority dismantled.

A forceful response, and one with his name on it, ensures he isn’t outflanked.

But the most important aspect of these moves may be the hardest to see.

When I interviewed the historian Yael Sternhell in Tel Aviv this week, she described the election campaign up to now as eerily quiet.

For an election that’s being described as the most consequential in the country’s history, there was much less drama than had been expected. And there has even been a sense of resignation among Mr Netanyahu’s supporters.

That quiet had been suiting his challenger.

Gadi Eisenkot, a former chief of the Israel Defence Forces, has built his campaign on being calm, steady and decidedly undramatic - so as not to give Mr Netanyahu’s supporters a reason to rally.

"I think this is something really important to understand about the Israeli right and about Netanyahu's right," Prof Sternhell told me.

"Whenever they feel besieged, threatened, they move into action."

Today, they were given a reason to feel exactly that.

Mr Eisenkot’s response was very telling.

He praised the troops and said he was praying for the wounded. He can hardly do otherwise. As a former army chief, he cannot for a moment be seen to criticise soldiers in the field, and anything that sounds like softness on security, three days out from an election, could be fatal to his chances.

But he has not played into any of the drama, either.

All of this has revived suspicions that have hung over the campaign for weeks. Earlier this month, former prime minister Ehud Barak accused Mr Netanyahu of laying the groundwork for a war designed to postpone the election.

His office denies any such intention, but Israeli media outlets have been reporting that the Prime Minister had asked Donald Trump to restart strikes on Iran.

It is very unlikely that Mr Netanyahu could actually delay the election - but he knows exactly how to make a crisis like this work for him.

Of course, the consequences of all of this are being felt most acutely, not in Israel, but in the West Bank.

In Hebron, a city of more than 200,000 people, no one is permitted to enter or leave.

Near the scene of the shooting, families were given just five minutes to leave before bulldozers began demolishing their homes.

Whether it changes Tuesday’s result is another matter.

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Part of Mr Eisenkot’s appeal is that he is seemingly promising that there will be much less of this type of thing - that things will just be normal in Israel.

For the many voters already tired of Mr Netanyahu’s constant drama, another military operation days before an election may only deepen the fatigue.

But polls have suggested that neither side is on course for a majority - that things are on a knife edge.

The last poll of the election, published tonight by Israeli public broadcaster KAN, suggests that the opposition bloc led by Mr Eisenkot will garner just two more seats than Mr Netanyahu’s bloc.

Both will fall well short of the 61 needed for a majority in parliament.

In a race this close, it doesn’t take much to change enough minds to make a difference.